Littlespring Finance

Tell us a little bit about your business.

Okay. So there's a bit of a history. I actually started my career with my family, working at, once was Ray Backhouse Financial Services, and then became Myriad Financial as we grew and expanded and added financial planning and accounting to our business. After that time, my parents, who I was working with in that business, decided to retire. So we sold that business on to another company. I spent a year there, just didn't realise it wasn't quite for me, and then moved on to work with another business partner. Again, wasn't quite what I wanted in regards to building my business and where I thought I saw my business going. So at the end of last year, I actually started my own business and, under Littlespring. And I'm working with another young broker, Sonu, and it's been fantastic. It's been a really amazing couple of months in the new business.

Awesome, thanks for that! You came to see me a couple of years ago—about a year and a bit ago. Yes, we found you a beautiful Tiffany. How has Tiffany been? How have you found the process with VA Platinum in bringing Tiffany on, and how have we helped you grow?

Look. It's been really amazing. And obviously, given my history with the previous business, I have worked with a lot of people in the office and staff that way. We found a lot of problems with that, and we never really found a good fit with our business. And I was very hesitant when I was obviously working in the other business, but I needed a staff member to help, which was Tiffany, in bringing someone in that was onshore. So that's when I reached out to you, and that was just over a year ago. And I brought Tiffany into the business, and she has been a godsend. She's been absolutely amazing. She's revolutionised my business and given me the time to do the things that are more important rather than being stuck in admin.

So how much do you think Tiffany and yourself, like, you know, on a weekly basis, how much deals do you guys lodge, you know? And helping you with all that time and admin-y kind of stuff.

Poor Tiffany. We'll check before Christmas. I think we were submitting about I think that month we submitted about 30 deals, in a month. So we probably settle on average. I was looking at the numbers the other day, about 18 deals a month, I think, anywhere between 10 and 24 deals a month. So it's very, very busy, and we do there's a lot of admin work and then obviously a lot of follow-ups to be done from that.

So you pretty much go and see the clients? Package the deal up and then go, here Tiff. Here you go.

Yeah. So, look, I, I meet the client. I actually prefer to do all my notes and compliance, now that, I'm maybe getting ahead of this, but I've obviously brought another person on since Tiffany with Sam. Sam is now doing all the data inside my CRM for me to make sure that when I come to that deal, everything's ready to go. I can write my notes, and then I do the compliance, and I hand it off to Tiffany or Sam, and they then follow that application literally from submission to settlement. The only time I really step in to get involved if it's credit critical or there's something they're not sure about, and I can then tell them, you know, which way which way to go from there.

On that note, because you brought up Sam, who is your 2nd VA, what was the decision to bring on that second person, and why was their decision to do that?

Look. I was getting to the point where Tiffany was getting crushed with work. She was literally working, an extra couple of hours a day, which was not fair for her. Although she was incredibly fast and got through the work in, honestly, lightning speed. She's phenomenal. We really need to relieve that pressure for her. Also, I've as I mentioned earlier, I've got got the secondary, broker who's working for me, Sonu. He's starting to do a little bit more volume. And, really, the only way he can grow is if he can have that support as well, so he's not stuck in admin. And because then he can spend his time going out meeting with, new referral partners or new clients and really focus on writing the business rather than doing the admin. So we made a decision. I mean, I needed an extra person anyway. But if I can give that extra support to him as well, then that's what we wanna do is grow as a business and just make sure that all our clients are having a really good experience.

One last question, Kate. Having the VAs and stuff like that, obviously, that's given some time back. What time, what are you gonna do this year that, you know, now that you've got so much time, I know you're going on holidays. But, yeah, tell me about your next holiday because you have now got a bit more time.

It's funny because I think every year I say I'm not gonna do as much, and I always break the numbers that I did the year before. I am insanely competitive with myself. So, unfortunately, this probably means I'm just gonna do even more numbers. But I'm hoping, within the next 12 months, next year will be a different story. As the girls grow and learn more, I would like to hand off more of that, back-end work to them. So I will literally just meet the client and they can do a lot of that other work for me. That's the goal. But I understand that takes a lot of time to learn. It took me a long time to learn how to do that. So but that's the goal. So that next year, I can take a whole month off instead of a couple of weeks or a few days here and there. But, yeah, that's the goal. But I wanna this year, I still because I've just started my business, I really wanna smash some pretty good numbers and, really grow that business and solidify my role and my business in the industry.

What would be the one advice for a client when they are looking to bring on outsourcing? What would be the one advice that you would give, if somebody was gonna bring on a VA?

Definitely patience because it's not like your traditional, way of hiring someone who's maybe had previous experience. But I would say the beauty of this system is although they don't have any experience, and you have to understand that, they learn a bit of work, a bit of information through their training, but you really need to spend the time training them. The beauty of that is you can train them exactly how you want them to work, and you can train them that, you know, there's no information that's coming from, oh, when I did it here, I did it there. You can teach them exactly how you want to do it. So if you just take that time, and I know that's so difficult in those first few months of training someone, and I had to do that with Tiffany. I gave up a whole lot of time to train her, but it was the best time spent because she has now the confidence to do all this work without me interfering, and I can hand over so much more work to her. And I feel like my stress levels have alleviated greatly.